Few places in the world possess such incredibly
diverse geologic formations and big swaths of wilderness. From the high mountains of the northeast to the labyrinthine canyons of the south, Utah's landforms stagger the mind and lure the adventurist in all of us. The Big 5 National parks bring millions of tourists to the state and provide sources of income for thousands of Utah resident companies. Parks include
Arches, Canyonlands, Zion, Bryce and Capitol Reef, while the Glen Canyon Reservoir frames the southern boundary of the state and showcases the Colorado and San Juan River systems. The Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest dominates the north-central and eastern portion of the state and the Great Salt Lake provides a natural refuge for thousands of birds during the year.
Taken as a whole, the Colorado Plateau may be Utah’s most iconic region. The slickrock landscapes of the Moab area where thousands of arches create windows to nearby mountains and the playful hoodoos of Bryce Canyon National park.
Southern Utah is blanketed with layers of beautiful multicolored
sedimentary rock with thousand-foot canyons where white water swiftly ushers adventure-seekers downriver. Iconic landforms in Utah’s portion include the Grand Staircase, an immense, staggered country trending northward from northern Arizona’s Grand Canyon to southern Utah’s Paunsaugunt Plateau. Level terraces separate each gargantuan step, as high as 2,000 feet, revealing layers of sandstone,
shale, limestone, and other sedimentary rock. The Goosenecks of the San
Juan River, another iconic formation, indicate where the river maintained its rate of sinuous down-cutting as the Colorado Plateau uplifted, resulting in deep, tight-coiled entrenched meanders. Two westerly outliers of the middle Rocky Mountains occupy northeastern Utah. Running north-south along the eastern margin of Salt
Lake City is the fault scarp of the Wasatch Range. These rugged
mountains, composed of a mélange of sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic
rocks, hit their apex at Mount Timpanogos north of Provo, which reaches
12,008 feet at its summit. Just east of the Wasatch are the Uinta
Mountains, an anticlinal uplift notable for being one of the few west-east trending mountain ranges in the Western Hemisphere. Its high
country, defined by vast rolling tableland flanked by glacially
scoured cirques, includes Utah’s loftiest summit, the 13,528-foot
Kings Peak.
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